Translate this posting

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Fat Guy in a Fat Boat

The classic
New England catboat.

“One thing about being at sea is
that you don’t really get to stop. A boat simply does not allow for genuine
rest. Its essential nature is peril, held in check only through enormous effort
and expense.”

A Mile Down; The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea

David Vann, 2005

The year that David Vann’s
disturbing book was published, I took ownership of the sailing vessel Copy Cat, the last 23-foot New England
cruising catboat built by Bill Menger -- who would pass over the bar two years
later.

I could write a book. So I
am. Next spring – as recreational boats are being put into the water – Pamet
River Books will publish The Fat Guy in
the Fat Boat.

This Columbus Day weekend,
however, it is being hauled out of the water for winter storage. My 2014
boating season is ended.

Much of buying a boat is
nautical foreplay:

Obsessively driving out to the
boatyard each weekend to observe the slow birthing of the vessel

Throwing a launch party,
right down to a bottle of bubbly cracked against hull

When I extended my hand to accept
the keys to the boat, I didn’t appreciate the “enormous effort and expense”
described in Vann’s book.

Copy Cat’s
homeport, for example, is
Red Brook Harbor, at the upper end of Buzzards Bay, just outside the Cape Cod
Canal. Frequent brisk winds over the
funnel-shaped Bay cause contrary interplay with tides in the Bay’s relatively
shallow waters, resulting in a phenomenon known as “standing waves” – as high
as six feet -- near the Canal. So Buzzards Bay always makes the Top Ten lists
of “Most Challenging” bodies of water in which to sail.

Then
there’s my own ineptitude. In the years I’ve skippered Copy Cat, I’ve kept a growing list of blunders:

Raising
the peak spar first instead of throat and peak spars together

Forgetting
to loosen the topping lift after the sail has been raised

Confusing
the 2nd reef outhaul with the first

Running
aground

Running
out of fuel

But the
heart will not be denied. From earliest times, our ancient ancestors clustered
their dwellings near bodies of water – ponds and lakes, rivers, the seas. As a
species, we come from water and are so much composed of water that we
instinctively regard it as our natural habitat.

In her
memoir, Paris France, Gertrude Stein
wrote:

“Writers have two countries. The
one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is
romantic. It is not real but it is really there.”

This is
true not only for writers, but for sailors, too. Which of the two is our real
country?

Sailors have a romantic anticipation in our mind’s eye of how we want
things to unfold aboard the private little country that is our boat. But
factors as simple as worsening weather or a failed shackle or a dry fuel tank
wrench us back to the real.

Still,
I can’t wait for spring, when I can return to the private little country that
is my boat.